Oil Spiel

America, Kunstler argues, is about to become one fantastically miserable place. Why? Because our entire standard of living is propped up by cheap oil, and the days of cheap oil are over. “No combination of alternative fuels is going
to allow us to run the United States the way we’ve been used to running it,” he tells the Dallas crowd. And though tonight he’ll resist calls to pinpoint when the nightmare will begin, he’s told the online environmental magazine Grist.org that “we’re going to be feeling the pain” in as little as three years, and suburban collapse might start in ten.

Sounds preposterous, on the face of it. But Kunstler bases his predictions on a geoeconomic concept called “peak oil” that is gaining credibility even within the petroleum industry. The theory holds that humankind has nearly, if not already, tapped 50 percent of the world’s fossil-fuel reserves